


The Mercurial Life of Sam Winchester

by Madiholmes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Essay, Gen, Nonfiction, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:27:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3396959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madiholmes/pseuds/Madiholmes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An essay on the internal life of Sam Winchester throughout his whole life, the changes it caused, and how it made him a better person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mercurial Life of Sam Winchester

The Mercurial Life of Sam Winchester

Sam is such an introvert. The older he has gotten, the more walled off he has become. Willingly sometimes gladly, doing what his father originally wanted to achieve.

Ten years is forever for an adult who has spent all the time in a migratory lifestyle. But now with the bunker and a life with Dean, Sam has exiled himself physically and emotionally from the rest of the world. The bunker is not a prison or monastery, but Sam treats it as a self-imposed house more than a home. Domestic dean domesticates, but Sam just lives there, and only now is starting to treat it as a residence. Sam in his own physical world has all but disappeared from the outside world in any real sense. Not quite a shut in, he has developed this walling in factor where he retreats into the bunker (already in the middle of nowhere) where not even the cameras themselves intrude into his private rooms. He gets to be as far away from other people as he can possibly get to an almost detriment of his own potential future in any mainstream sense. At this point, he’s still a born again virgin as we haven’t seen him with anyone at all on a romantic or emotional level since that episode. We’re just not let into the truly inner sanctum of Sam Winchester.

It’s one part survival, one part having a home that can truly protect him from the outside forces, and one part giving up those dream of a fourteen year old Sam.

Sam’s whole life has been one of migration and drifting throughout reason America. His white, picket fence dream of permanent of permanent residence was always an abstract reality. Even as a child, he never once had that kind of life, and it was always a certain by both fate and parental decisions to protect him. Those dreams were to give him hope of a better future as an adult who could make his own choices and lifestyle without a parent imposing massive disruptions on him without fully explaining why.

John never once spared Sam’s feelings or desires when moving them around or making other extremely disruptive choices, but did so to protect his children. He never pretended to be there friend, but he was their father as has been now enshrined in their memories. He forced them to constantly move, but also forced Dean to lie to Sam for the first ten years of their lives about the reality of their situation. He put a massive wedge of distrust between the two when it was outed (something they both seemed to have gotten past), but also that Sam could no longer trust the outside world. It wasn’t just that monsters and supernatural evil existed, it was that he’d already outgrown them as a child. Suddenly everything was back on the table from ghosts and God to the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Sam had to completely reevaluate all of reality, and didn’t know what to trust or believe. It wasn’t that he believed in the Easter Bunny until he was eleven, it was that the Easter Bunny had just as much right to exist as a Shtrigga. He had to go back to the first step of belief in everything, and then discount them without relying on anyone or their society to tell them what to believe.

Time has all but erased Sam’s anger and negative judgments about John. The angry, young man of the first seasons has been tempered by love, acceptance, and self-recognition. This comes not just for maturity and Dean but from some Very hard lessons about sacrifice and humility. Sam has always been quick to judge and disapprove and think better of himself in some not very kindly ways when compared to others. It’s not one of his better traits, and it’s something he definitely inherited from his grandfather, Henry. Now that he’s older, he’s realized that John’s mistakes were vast, but they were done to protect the boys above all else.

What we often lack is the understanding and onscreen presence is Sam’s own closed-off-ness. Dean is an open diary that leaks all of his emotional exuberance and pain. Dean shuts down those chick flick moments with Sam, but Sam lets him as well. But to everyone else, Dean can be destroyed emotionally surprisingly easy. Sam has even done it himself a few times.

Cas is an alien who has spent years assimilating into a completely new culture and with what amounts to be aliens. That relationship has actually opened up quite a bit under Carver deep in a very satisfying way with Cas and Sam becoming closer as friends independent of Dean where he doesn’t have to run interference or provide a friendship bridge between the two anymore. But where Castiel is a different entity, and Dean is a stoic care bear, Sam is a bastion of self-repression and exile.

We do not realize it until we see Sam actually does open up in real ways. All of his grumpy disapproval is mostly superficial such as when Dean is being big brother embarrassing, while Cas is distanced and had been mostly Sam’s friend through Dean- seeing that friendship develop and being expressed is one of the few ways we’ve seen Sam interact with an outsider in a deeply, meaningful way. Cas isn’t an outsider, but he had been treated at times as though one by Sam even and sometimes especially when he wasn’t.

Because Sam is so insular, it’s hard to see the progress he’s made and how it is applied within the show. He’s had multiple outsider-in discussions with himself where others have played avatars of Sam Winchester, and it’s very much these discussions that show where Sam started as an angry, forthwith child to a beaten and much more understanding adult. Sam’s own mind accused himself of failing to give him that life he wanted and make the choices he wanted from 14 year old Sam while he was drying out. It wasn’t from a lack of trying, but it was also a failure of a kind.

Where it really mattered in Sam understanding himself and his life was in the mirror scene with Lucifer. Until then, Sam had thought his father was an uncaring asshole who did things to anger him as a child for no real reason. We only saw the external components, but not the internal. His father was right about the danger levels, and Sam realized that he had been stalked his whole life by demons in this moment. Lucifer couldn’t help but gloat over the irony and emotional trauma it created, but where Sam could have broken in that and maybe even did. Once Sam realized that his entire life had been one of danger and completely manipulation, his entire understanding of the world changed. It forced Sam to reevaluate everything he used to believe- his father, his brother, his belief in good, that he was a victim, but that he was also a survivor, and could change. He would be more accepting of his own failures even as he strove to correct them. It helped him overcome Lucifer during the Apocalypse with Dean coming to him in love and deference and not hate and angered conviction.

Where it really meant was that he in that moment learned how to allow the failures of others- especially his father and brother, but more importantly truly accept their love and love them back. That he had to learn to control his rage against the world and find peace with everything. That there was a massive difference between mistakes born out of love and sacrifice and those borne out of hatred and jealousy. It wasn’t the mistakes made that were the sins, it was the emotions that caused those mistakes to happen. Where someone loses so much control that they’d burn the world down just to prove that they were right.

With it came the recognition that he couldn’t have that mainstream lifestyle, he’d always be out in the fringes somewhere because of it, but the bunker and his brother provide a stability and life where he can be himself while still confined to being a hunter and that lifestyle, but now he seems more emotionally healthy and stable from it. It is a form of giving up those dreams of his childhood, but he’s giving them up on his own terms. He gets to have the white picket bunker with all the books therein. He gets to be with his brother, but now he has his own room and personal items and gets to control who has access to them. He gets to understand his father better, his childhood, and just how far he’s overcome after a lifetime of fighting and anger and fighting against all of Earth and heaven and hell. He gets to be happy and stable and not worry about his own psychological or spiritual well-being for the most part anymore.


End file.
